What Happened in Budapest
by Julchen M. Liddell
Summary: After a heavy night of drinking, the secrets of Budapest are finally revealed. It's not what anyone expected. Pure crack.


** Bear in mind that the good majority of the characters here are drunk out of their minds when Budapest starts being explained. Any and all OOC can be attributed to heavy alcohol consumption. Please drink responsibly.**

* * *

Tony's idea of "Avenger's Team Bonding Night" consisted of heavy drinking for everyone. By nearly midnight half—including both master assassins because they had been given specific orders to remain and participate in the Avengers Initiative, whatever it might entail—the team was complete smashed. The only exceptions were Bruce, who wisely abstained for obvious reasons, and Steve, who couldn't get drunk no matter how hard Tony and Thor tried (and hot damn, did they try).

By two in the morning, the alcohol buzz began to wear off and Tony, Clint, Thor, and even Natasha were aware that they were going to have killer headaches when they woke up later. But, until then, they were all still feeling good even if they weren't going nuts anymore.

The team, looking decidedly unheroic, crashed in the main room of the party deck. There were still several large and deep Loki-shaped craters in the floor that Tony had declared war memorials, and they sat surrounding the largest. Thor was so hammered (pardon the pun) he didn't even see an issue with it.

"Wershtiii..." Tony tried to begin, his speech still slurred. He frowned, cleared his throat, and made another attempt. "We're shtill 'sposed to be bonding, 'n all that shit. Earth's Mightiest Heroes gotta be BFFs or whatever."

Steve looked horribly uncomfortable. Nobody could really blame him. He hadn't particularly wanted to stick around the partying ever since Thor and him arm-wrestled around 11:30 and ended up smashing an Oriental table. "Don't you think we might have had enough for tonight?"

"Nah," Clint scoffed with a hiccup. "Cap, this is like...the most kickass slumber party ever. We gotta go through all the other teenage girl sleepover bullshit. That's how you get a good team."

"I din' let you assholes crash in this tower for nothing."

"Tony," Bruce began quietly, looking stressed, "I don't think this is really good for..."

"Shut up man, we gotta get you to loosen up at some point anyway." The billionaire slung his arm over Bruce's shoulders and ruffled his hair. All he accomplished was Bruce beginning to look annoyed.

"That's _really _not a good idea."

"Even worse than staying awake at this point," Steve added.

Natasha grabbed one of her knives out of nowhere and twiddled it around her fingers, pouting like a petulant child. "I don't wanna go to sleep yet. Weird things happen when I wake up after a night like this."

Everyone stared at her. Steve wisely decided to drop the subject.

"The internet says sleepovers usually involve pillowfights, gossip, and storytelling," Tony announced, reading off his phone. "I don't have pillows here, but I think we took care of the fighting part when Spangles and Bob took out Pepper's kotatsu."

Thor furrowed his brow in confusion. "Bob? Do you mean me? I do not—"

"Bob the Builder," Tony interrupted, spreading his arms like it was the greatest thing ever. "He's got a hammer, or whatever."

There was a long beat of silence.

"...Shut up, I'm not at my best."

"Nobody said anything."

"You were thinking it."

"Anyway! We're all done fighting I hope, because if my tower gets smashed up again I'mma be pissed. We did gossip when Clint started spewing out SHIELD secrets we all knew anyway—"

"They were highly classified, actually, I'm going to regret that later."

"Well _I _already knew them anyway. So now we just gotta do storytelling and then we can call it a night. Sound good, Uncle Sam?"

The group looked at Steve expectantly. Tony and Clint had broken out their puppy eyes, Thor was trying and failing to mimic it, Natasha looked like she just didn't care anymore as long as she didn't have to sleep, and Bruce's please-God-let-this-be-over look was painfully evident.

Steve threw his hands in the air. "I give up. Do what you want."

All the drunks sans Natasha cheered. Steve wondered what he'd gotten himself into.

"So who wants to go first?" Tony's gaze suddenly zeroed in on where Natasha and Clint sat together. "Actually, know what? There's something I've always wanted to know, but I couldn't ever find it in SHIELD's files, which is borderline impossible."

"Yeah, what is it?"

"During the Chitauri invasion you and Nat said something about Budapest. I think I speak for everyone when I say, what the fuck happened in Budapest?"

Natasha's knife slipped out of her fingers and embedded itself in the floor next to her. Her eyes glazed over and she fixed Tony with a look that might have been murderous if it hadn't been so terrifyingly stoic. "No."

Clint shook his head. "We are not going into Budapest. It's not in SHIELD's database specifically because nobody can know what happened. It's not even filed on paper."

Tony let out a long whine. "But _you _guys know what happened, right?"

Now perfectly sober, Natasha snapped, "Of course we know what happened, we were there. But it's a moment in my life I never want to relive and I definitely do _not _want to share it!"

Her partner chipped in, "Hell, the only people who really know what happened there are me, Nat, Fury, and Coulson. It's like that for a damn good reason too."

Tony copied Natasha's pout from earlier. "Come oooon. You got orders to participate in team bonding and shit like that, plus isn't there like that rule, 'Sharing is Caring' or whatever? We'll all be a better team at the end of it."

Bruce took in Natasha's glare. "You might want to drop it..."

"No! I wanna know!"

The two assassins shared a look, Natasha biting her lip in a rare display of uncertainty.

"He's got a point...we're defying orders either way," Clint pointed out.

After a long, tense pause, the Russian woman's breath rushed out in a heavy sigh.

"Fine," she said, standing up and moving towards the bar. "Fine! But if we're going to do this, there's no way in hell I'm going through with it sober."

* * *

Twenty-eight minutes and three bottles of Stark Tower's best hard vodka later, they were ready to tell the _What Happened In Budapest, Goddamn It Tony _story. They were all back in a circle around the Loki-crater, everyone tactfully keeping their distance from Clint and Natasha, though Tony and Thor leaned in curiously.

Natasha suppressed a hiccup. "Well, let's start at the beginning."

"Nat's gonna tell most of it," Clint said. "She's a bigger part of the story than me."

"Shut up, you're important too."

"God, I wish I wasn't."

Natasha passed him a bottle of booze. He downed half of it in one swig. She cleared her throat and began again.

"So this was back when I was a private assassin, right?"

Everyone nodded. They were aware of her past.

"And I got hired out and sent to Hungary to take out this nobleman who was visiting from Egypt, who secretly dealt in a drug trade off the side. To do that I had to cozy up to him and his bodyguards and all that, and it wasn't really that hard. The last night, the night I got the job done, he invites me into his sitting room in the penthouse he was renting. He and his buddies were in there smoking up a hookah storm and he wanted me to join them. I did, of course."

Natasha's face darkened and there was a long pause while she drowned herself in liquor again. "All the nobleman's buddies cleared out sometime early in the morning and his bodyguards were passed out too. I suppose they didn't think anyone in the room was really a threat, or they were just too stoned to care. Anyway, it was easy for me to get my job done and get out of there without anyone being the wiser. I went back to my hotel room and passed out. Slept through the whole day.

"Well, I should have figured that a guy who dealt in exotic drugs would keep some for himself. I don't know _what _was in that hookah, but it really messes with someone's head."

She shuddered. Clint rubbed her shoulders sympathetically, a haunted look in his eyes. The rest of the team was thoroughly engaged, even Steve and Bruce. The circle tightened as they all gradually scooted in, and now they're sitting nearly shoulder-to-shoulder.

"What happened then?" Thor asked eagerly.

Natasha took a deep breath and closed her eyes. "So I wake up just as the sun's beginning to go down wondering what eggs would look like if I threw them at someone, right?"

Steve blinked. "What?"

"Weird hookah, remember. I wanted to see what would happen if I threw eggs at people."

Tony, however, who had joined Natasha in her drinking spree and was by now just as drunk as he was when the 'team bonding' first got going, nodded thoughtfully. "Makes sense. Someone needs to write a book about it."

Everyone tried to imagine a Natasha higher than a kite, so far out of her mind she actually goes to a store and buys a few carton of eggs to throw at people. She was always so serious and professional, this imagery was almost impossible to picture. Almost.

"Shhh, let me tell the story!" the assassin herself hissed at Tony. "You're a terrible audience."

He had the decency to look ashamed of himself. "I'm sorry, Miss Romanov. Go on."

"We're good?"

"Yes."

She arranged herself into a more comfortable position and everyone realized that this was where the story got really interesting. They all leaned in further.

"So I had my eggs and as soon as it started to get dark enough for my plan I changed into my black jumpsuit, the one I had for when I had to pull of sneaky operations. Not a SHIELD uniform, but...you know. The sun hadn't quite gone down yet so I threw some eggs at the pedestrians from the shadows until _finally _it got fully dark out." She stopped to catch her breath. "I thought, well great, and went to this _huge _house I had seen earlier and went, 'Yep. This is it.'

"I jump out of my car and just start lobbing these eggs at the house. Alarms start going off and dogs start coming out of nowhere and I'm like, 'Shit'. Turns out it was the Hungarian Vice President's house. Even though I'm still addled by crazy hookah, I know to jump back in my car and take off instead of just running, and as I'm going all I can think is like, _I'm this master assassin who's wanted in almost every country, and I'm about to be caught for it because I decided to egg a house_."

Natasha stopped to catch her breath. "You all following so far?"

There's a chorus of varying affirmations. She looked to Clint.

"This is where you come in, so explain what you were up to so it doesn't get too confusing."

He squared his shoulders. "Right. So I'm in Hungary at the same time, because I was told that the Black Widow would be there. SHIELD didn't know who her target was, they didn't know it was that Egyptian guy, and so I was sent out to help protect the important people in Budapest. Naturally I got assigned to the vice president."

The archer sighed heavily and his head dropped. "Except the thing is, the vice president and Nat's target were privately dealing with each other. The VP had the same sort of drugs in his place, but in an incense, and since I was there when he was lighting it off I got hit with it too."

Steve couldn't help the "Oh God" that came out.

"I know, right?" Clint groaned. "Anyway, all us agents are expecting the Black Widow to show up at some point, and I had specific instructions to kill her on sight if I could. So naturally when all the alarms start going off we start freaking out, and I run outside to see if I could get her. I catch a sight of Nat just standing there on the street in her jumpsuit with her arms full of all these god damn egg cartons, and since I'm messed up by the hookah shit too I'm thinking, _Mother fuck, she's egging the house_, instead of, _She's...egging the house? _Like, the fact that she's egging the house instead of going inside and killing the Hungarian vice president just makes perfect sense to me.

"Naturally when Nat gets back in her car and starts taking off, I start running after her and shooting a whole bunch of arrows and all that. Because fuck, we're both higher than the Empire State Building and I'm thinking that egging a politician's house is a crime punishable by death in Hungary, and I had orders to kill her anyway. So I chase her down into a more main part of the city and almost hit her car a few times—my aim was pretty off, but nobody got hurt, which was good—until finally I managed to stop her."

"It was disorienting on my end too," Natasha picked back up. "I'm just driving along trying to get away from the action when something shiny dropped in front of my car, and _BOOM_! It was one of Hawkeye's exploding arrows or something. I barely get the car stopped before all hell breaks loose and I jump back out, but before I know it, arrows are coming down from _everywhere_."

"And I'm just overhead looking down on her, and she spots where I'm perched, and you could just tell by the look on Nat's face that she's there thinking, _Aw hell naw, that bitch ain't shooting at __**me**_," Clint said, grinning.

Natasha looked irritated. "That was not my face."

"It so was. You got pissed."

Seemingly almost too afraid to ask, Bruce piped up, "And what happened when she got angry?"

"Her reaction time was really impressive. The minute she saw where the dumbass with the arrows—me, obviously—was hiding, she ducked under this bus overhang and starts chucking this hugeass freaking rocks at me because she didn't have any other weapon on her."

"Wait, wait, hold on," Tony interrupted. "_Natasha Romanov _didn't have any weapons on her?"

"Hookah" was the simple response. The billionaire accepted it and settled back down.

"However," Natasha continued, "I was clearly still in possession of some of my mental facilities. I saw that there was no way I could beat someone with a bow and arrow, and we were too far apart for hand-to-hand, so the minute I saw an opportunity I ran into the nearest open building I could for an escape. It was crowded so I thought I would be safe for a while, or at least able to blend in long enough to get him off my back."

"Which would be all well and good, except..." Clint's breath huffed out. "She ended up running into some kind of dancing theatre. There was a buncha chicks in can-can skirts going across the stage."

The group burst out laughing.

"Of course, I don't pay any attention this and am still focused on getting away from the asshole from earlier," Natasha said. "Still messed up by hookah, the effects of which only seemed to get worse the longer you were in action, I jumped up onto the stage and wedged myself between a couple of the dancers. I discovered one thing then and there."

She closed her eyes and took a swallow of vodka. There was a long, dramatic silence.

"I do not have a dance soul," she concluded vaguely. The look on her face was nothing short of tranquil and accepting of this fact.

Tony snorted. "You ain't a dancing queen, huh?"

"Nor am I 'young and sweet'. Well in any case, I'm pretty obvious up on stage seeing as I'm the only in in a catsuit up there that can't dance, so naturally Clint spots me and begins advancing. I do a cop role trying to preserve my already meager dignity after the terrible dancing. We chased each other around stage a bit until suddenly the director jumped up yelling 'CUT! CUT! CUT!'"

"...Wow."

Everyone, the assassins included, visibly tried to suppress the urge to begin laughing again.

"'What play are you two doing?' he asks," Clint said, "and me and Nat kinda look at each other. We can't really admit we're an assassin and a secret agent, and I can't very well kill her right there in front of everyone. So we're all like, 'Ya know, that one musical...the one with the...spies.'"

Natasha sucked in a deep breath. "Two musical numbers later—excuse me, two _improvised _musical numbers later, I learned another important thing."

Steve was covering his broad grin with his hand. "What did you learn?"

"I can't sing, and neither could he," Natasha replied simply, jerking her thumb at Clint. She had yet to open her eyes and one hand was still occupied with the rapidly-emptying bottle of Reyka's. "But at least he could shake his ass like nobody's business."

It took a few minutes for everyone to catch their breath.

"After that we both made excuses as to why we couldn't stay in the theatre and get our own show, and we escaped outside. Exhausted from tap dancing—don't ask, it wasn't my idea—we collapsed on the sidewalk and waited for our priorities to catch up to us."

"Nat turns to me and is like, 'So you still gonna kill me?' And I'm tired as fuck from all that, and at this point the drugs are starting to wear off both of us. That hookah shit takes a lot out of you. But we're still buzzed enough for her to be all 'Wanna go egg the president's house?' and that sounds like a square deal to me so we went and did that for a bit."

"Solid logic," Tony agreed.

"After we egg the president's house, Nat escapes back to where she was hiding and I go back to SHIELD. They have footage of the whole thing but Fury tells me I'm too good an agent to let go because I accidentally got high as fuck and let an internationally wanted assassin escape out from under me after we almost became the next Broadway stars. A few years later I met her again, didn't kill her again, and that's when she joined SHIELD."

"And so to answer your question, Stark," Natasha concluded, "_that _is what happened in Budapest."

The Avengers applauded. Clint and Natasha made them swear that the story would never leave that room, and they all agreed.

It went viral, with obligatory name changes, within the week.

Of course it did.

* * *

**A/N:**

** Okay so I'm just chilling on Facebook last night, right, and I'm buddies with Dolphinz514 and JasperSellene. We're con friends. Anyway, Dolphinz posts this status saying that Jasper told her what really happened in Budapest and so of course I'm like "Jasper share your secrets" and long story short, THIS was it. Sort of. It was more abridged on Facebook and I asked her if I could fic it because it was just that glorious. Basically, the whole plot of this story belongs to JasperSellene. She's a genius.**


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